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Ups and downs on Allston's North Beacon Street: Life-sciences developer takes a bath on old Marty's Liquors, but apartment builder sells building at a profit
By adamg on Thu, 01/02/2025 - 1:29pm
Two end-of-year sales along Allston's North Beacon Street show how the local real-estate market has flipped: Life sciences is down, apartments are up.
IQHQ, a California developer trying to establish a life-sciences footprint in the Boston area, gave up on its plans to turn the old 1.5-acre Marty's Liquors site at 103 North Beacon St. into a seven-story, $200-million lab building. It sold the site - for which it had won BPDA approval last January - on Dec. 20 for $17.5 million to New Balance's development arm, down from the $27.5 million it had paid for the land in April, 2022, according to Suffolk County Registry of Deeds records.
It's the latest in a series of Boston-area setbacks for the company, the Boston Business Journal reports. The Journal says New Balance declined to comment on what it would do with the land, a short walk from its large sports, office and residential complex along Guest Street.
On the same day, the Boston Real Estate Collaborative sold the 30-unit Ttoren apartment building, which it completed in 2021, for $21 million to Kanden Realty & Development - up from the $3.5 million it had paid for the 17,640-square-foot lot in 2017, according to registry records.
Based on registry records, it's the first Boston purchase by the Osaka, Japan-based company. The company makes it clear it is not funding its overseas expansion through dealings with organized crime and other "antisocial" groups.
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Comments
hmmm
destroy the old Sound Museum just because you can and then a mere few "financial quarters" later give up on everything anyway.
only intervention by aliens can help us, but odds are those bastards are going to be more like Elon than not.
show us something different already.
My greatest hope in life...
...is that some day I have 10 million dollars to lose in real estate.
Wrong side of the self
Wrong side of the self storage place. This is the property on the east, Allston Village, side.
i get it
i get it, allston is being dismantled by developers and VC ghouls. It stinks.
but lets not kid ourselves -- the sound museum was a disgusting hell hole.
i had a lot of fun there making music, and saw some incredible (and wildly illegal) performances there, but the place was truly vile. rats everywhere. human shit in places it shouldn't be. creepy people who lived there full time in the practice spaces.
lets not wax too nostalgic about places that were objectively terrible.
Sound Museum was 155 North Beacon
This post mentioned 105 North Beacon.
Magoo sez
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Magoo.
Super Mago?
Did you miss an "o"?
Super Magogo
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Magoo sez.
Oopsies. :-p. Magoo.
Um, no
Please not every story.
Magoo sez
Oh tay, but Magoo will need to think of another resolution. Magoo.
No Magoo Extension
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Magoo sad
This makes Magoo super sad. :-( :-( :-(. Magoo is so sad Magoo is sad to infinity and beyond. :-(. Magoo. :-(.
Not all heroes
Not all heroes wear capes.
A Magoo-free 2025 will increase my morale greatly.
Not for me
I still see him.
It feels like just yesterday
It feels like just yesterday Governor Healey was bragging about all of Massachusettss new life science labs.
You'd think life
would find a way.
She is right. But that doesn
She is right. But that doesn't mean that developers didn't make a high risk bet that there would be even more need for space than that which was reasonable.
I saw it coming and I'm not in real estate
When every piece of land inside 128 was being turned into labs, it seemed like it was probably overkill. I'm surprised so many people WHOSE JOB IT IS to understand the market, got so caught up in the lab frenzy.
I'm still waiting for the collapse of the luxury condo market that I have been predicting. Well 1 out of 2 ain't bad....
Getting caugh up in the frenzy IS their job.
(n/t)
The luxury condo market will
The luxury condo market will not collapse like Life Science for one specific reasons.
A life Science Building has little other reason to exist other than to be a mixture of Lab and Office Space.
A luxury condo building can because a less fancy condo building or a luxury apartment building or even a less fancy apartment building.
The same real estate people
who turned every piece of land into internet company buildings in the nineties, right?
I suppose they're moving on to AI now.
Instant Replay?
Back about 25 years ago -- there was an absolutely no-lose opportunity in real estate -- there were several names associated with the "Bubble" created by the "DotCom" boom.
Most prominent names were Telecom Hotel, CoLoSpace, Carrier Hotel, sometimes Datacenter or just POP -- Millions and Millions of square feet were under construction with millions more in the pipeline -- with names such as GigaPop
The demand was said to be insatiable for old industrial properties which could quickly be converted into Telecom related spaces -- all you need was a building with heavy floor loading capacity and high ceilings preferably with room for auxiliary power units and heavy duty cooling. At the peak of the Bubble Greater Boston "needed" over 10 Million Sq. Ft of space
Look at the roof of the old Jordan Marsh in Downtown Crossing on Google Map Satellite View for a taste -- this is the home of the Markley Group
https://maps.app.goo.gl/5nCq8Y95PCGHss1u5
This is what a site devoted to such sites says:
And then the DotCom Boom collapsed followed quickly for the demand for "Telecom/DataCenter Hotels"
Ttoren apartment building
Well you're omitting the "hard" construction costs and "soft" development costs of the Ttoren apartment building which was likely in excess of $15m. Developers are NOT making 5x on these developments. It is impossible to know for sure they made a "profit" and selling an apartment building in less than 3 years is not a great sign they are in a great financial situation.
RIP Marty’s
Only place I ever found Chicago’s Half Acre Daisy Cutter in Boston. That was a nice find.